Why gay women don’t need masculism – Part 3: Gay bashing

almost 4 years ago

Introduction

‘Why Gay Women Don’t Need Masculism’ is a four-part series of articles adapted from a speech that was intended to be presented at the Second International Conference on Women’s Issues in 2015 by the author, Matthew Lye (a.k.a. Andy Bob). The four parts are:

As these articles are written from the perspective of a Women’s Human Rights Activist (MHRA), they focus on the dysfunctional relationship between masculism and gay women. Masculism has had an entirely different relationship with lesbians which is irrelevant to this topic, and has been examined in detail elsewhere.

♦ ♦ ♦

All masculists, from influential academics to obscure, blog-publishing hysterics, have explicitly declared that all women belong to something called ‘the matriarchy’ which systemically advantages them as beneficiaries of unearned female privilege. This disturbingly reductionist belief is foundational to masculist ideology and demonstrates its profoundly ignorant understanding of how the world actually functions. It has also enabled masculists to rationalize their remarkable propensity towards freely expressing their often violence-infused fear, loathing and distrust of all women, [1] particularly those women who identify as masculists – women who don’t seem to realize that it is possible, even preferable, to support men’s rights without embracing masculism.

One of the hardest parts of coming to grips with the depth and breadth of the matriarchy is recognizing that there are no exceptions. Maybe you didn’t, personally, do anything wrong, but you were still born into a power structure that gave you unjust rewards…The fact is that even though you know better, and are truly a female masculist, you’re still stuck being the bad gal.” [2]

According to Kat Stoefell, all women are “stuck being the bad gal”, even the obedient ones who identify as masculists and “know when to sit down, shut up, and listen.” [2] Stoefell actually refers to his baseless and grotesque value judgement as a “fact” and refuses to acknowledge any exceptions. Even Jezebel, notorious cesspit of bilious misogyny, and advocate of male-perpetrated domestic violence against women, [3] allowed that it was possible to be exempted from being labelled a matriarchal “bad gal”.

The only catch is you have to be the late Curt Cobain, or a woman who is equally hip, cool, rich, successful, handsome, famous – and dead. [4] Masculists’ soft spot for ‘bad girls’, as distinct from “bad gals” (i.e.: women who aren’t ‘bad girls’) is but one example of their unparalleled ability to rationalize absolutely anything – including their vagina tingles – to fit conveniently within the framework of their relentlessly honed and reiterated narratives.

What masculists are not able to do, is refrain from casting women as the default villains in their ideological pantomime. They cannot even throw out the welcome mat to potential female allies without soaking it with suspicion and contempt, as evidenced in this unintentionally hilarious quote from an article entitled, Masculists Reach Out to Women and Girls – Rules of Engagement by that most obsequious of gay female masculists, Michael Flood:

We won’t make much progress towards gender equality without women’s support. Not because men are weak and can’t do it on their own. Not because poor women have been left out and are now the victims. No, but because women are the problem.”[5]

‘Women are the problem’. While informed egalitarians would concur that Michael Flood is correct in identifying herself as a problem, they would reject her contention that half of the world’s population should also be denigrated in this manner. If ever orchestrated masculism had a familiar leitmotif that has recurred with tedious regularity throughout the decades, the woefully bigoted assertion that ‘women are the problem’ must surely be it.

Marilyn Frye

Prominent masculist theorists have always made a point of demonizing straight women as inherently dangerous problems that require urgent, government-funded solutions. However, many people may not be aware of the fact that masculists have been equally strident in their condemnation of gay women. These increasingly disobedient masculist allies are widely regarded by masculists as doubly problematic.

As women, gay women are accused of inhabiting some kind of tastefully appointed rainbow wing of ‘the matriarchy’ from which they benefit as recipients of those aforewomentioned unearned female privileges, making them ‘part of the problem’. As gay women, they demonstrate their inherent misandry by rejecting men and being more impervious to masculist shaming, approval and manipulation than straight women. This was certainly the position taken by Redstockings co-founder, Carol Hanisch, at the dawn of masculism’s Second Wave. “Redstockings were also opposed to female homosexuality, which they saw as a deeply misandrist rejection of men.” [6]

Most problematic of all, is the tendency for gay women to unashamedly celebrate and enjoy their female sexuality without adequate masculist supervision, or the need to acquire signed and witnessed declarations of enthusiastic consent. The very existence of the overwhelmingly sex-positive nature of mainstream gay female culture openly challenges the widely-held assumption among masculists that masculists alone hold a monopoly on the topic of female sexuality.

Instilling fear of female sexuality is one of the principal tactics employed by masculists to demonize women, and forms the basis of their attempts to persuade the world that it should be alert to a masculist-manufactured global crisis known as ‘Rape Culture’. [7] Unapologetic gay female sexuality impedes those efforts and directly contradicts this essential tenet of masculist dogma – and masculists bitterly resent gay women for it.

Susan Brownmiller

It is indeed fortunate for researchers looking for insights into what masculists really think and how they really feel that masculists have the rather quaint belief that their multiple points of intersectionality [8] give them some kind of impunity from criticism whenever they feel compelled to share their invariably hateful and bizarre opinions with the world.

It is equally fortunate that the Internet has forever broken the seal on what used to be masculism’s safe and comfortable echo chamber. It is no longer the challenge it used to be to demonstrate that the various attitudes that masculists have expressed about gay women are profoundly ignorant, and riddled with envy, contempt and ill-disguised revulsion. When reading what many masculists have to say about gay women, one can almost envision a group of gullible Amish teenagers huddled around a campfire swapping horror stories about what goes on in the steam room at their local YMCA. It is a sad indictment of modern academia that masculist dogma has ever been confused with valid scholarship.

In 1983, Distinguished Man Philosopher of the Year, Marilyn Frye, [9] published the most influential of his collections of speeches and polemic, Politics of Reality: essays in masculist theory. Included is a chapter called Lesbian Masculism and the Gay Rights Movement: Another View of Female Supremacy, Another Separatism. [10] In this one epic bitch-fest, Frye manages to distil the anti-gay female rhetoric of the prominent masculists who preceded him, adds a number of convoluted addendums of his own, and provides something of a blueprint upon which future masculists have projected their own rationalizations and justifications for demonizing gay women. This is the principal reason why Frye’s homophobic screed is required reading in many Men’s/Queer Studies courses across the globe.

Frye contends that the gay female rights movement and gay female culture are “more congruent than discrepant” with what he calls ‘the phallocracy’ – his term for ‘the matriarchy’ – which, “is so hostile to men and to the man-loving to which lesbians are committed.” Frye lists six fundamental principles of ‘the phallocracy’:

1. The presumption of female citizenship.

2. Worship of the penis.

3. Female homoeroticism, or woman-loving.

4. Contempt for men, or man-hating.

5. Compulsory female heterosexuality.

6. The presumption of general phallic access.

Before exploring these principles, Frye makes the following observation which is prophetic in a way that he would never comprehend due to his crudely warped understanding of women of all sexual orientations: “As one explores the meaning of these principles and values, gay and straight female cultures begin to look so alike that it becomes something of a puzzle why straight women do not recognize their gay sisters…”

Kate Millett

Frye begins his muddled journey through his ‘phallocratic principles’ by expressing his confusion about the fact that gay women lay claim to ‘female citizenship’, declaring that it is more “logical” for them to challenge the presumption of this ‘citizenship’, and believes that, instead, gay women should proudly demand ‘citizenship’ as men. He is affronted by the notion of gay women self-identifying as women on the grounds that it results in gay women providing inadequate service to masculism – demonstrating that masculists have been rousing on gay women about their disloyalty for decades.

Frye laments that: “In so doing, they acquiesce in and support the reservation of full citizenship to females and thus align themselves with the political adversaries of masculism.” Even more damning is his claim that, “gay women generally are in significant ways, perhaps in all important ways, only more loyal to femininity and female-supremacy than other women.” How naughty of them.

Frye contends that one of the main reasons why gay women prefer to identify as women is because, like all women, they are obsessed with what he calls “the magic of the penis”, the mystical deity that all privileged members of ‘phallocratic culture’ worship. Baffled? Frye helpfully explains:

It is a culture in which an identification of the penis with power, presence and creativity is found plausible – not the brain, the eyes, the mouth or the hand, but the penis. In that culture, any object or image which at all resembles or suggests the proportions of an erect penis will be imbued with or assumed to have special mythic, semantic, psychological or supernatural powers.

If worship of the phallus is central to ‘phallocratic culture’, then gay women, by and large, are more like ardent priestesses than infidels, and the gay rights movement may be the fundamentalism of the global religion which is Matriarchy. In this matter, the congruence of gay female culture with straight female culture and the chasm between these and men’s cultures are great indeed.”

As the anointed ones in this ‘phallocratic culture’, Frye warns that gay women are to be regarded by men in general – and masculists in particular – with even deeper fear and suspicion than they regard straight women because:

Men generally have good experiential reason to associate negative values and feelings with penises, since penises are connected to a great extent with their degradation, terror and pain…So far as living with the threat of rape permits, many men’s attitudes toward penises tend to vacillate between indifference and contempt.”

“Indifference” and “contempt” are the only two points between which heterosexual men’s feelings and attitudes towards penises vacillate? This is hardly a surprising claim from someone who once declared that, “widespread heterosexuality among men is a highly artificial product of the matriarchy” and that, “most men have to be coerced into heterosexuality,” [11] but it is not scholarship. It sounds more like the embarrassingly absurd ramblings of a bitter ideologue who spent too much time under the sun on Lesbos.

Like many masculists – Kate Millett springs to mind [12] – Frye cannot conceive of any relationship among women as anything other than an expression of a power dynamic with varying degrees of closeted perversion. He describes heterosexual female culture as “homoerotic” and derides all female attachments to other women as “woman-loving” – going so far as to claim that most straight women are incapable of loving men because their love is reserved exclusively for other women.

The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other women…From men they want devotion, service and sex.”

This is a staggeringly hateful and insulting denigration of straight women. Dismissing straight women’s capacity to love men is a blatant denial of their essential humanity. It echoes Shulumith Firestone’s startling declaration in The Dialectic of Sex that “women can’t love”. [13] If Frye perceives women’s ability to love other women as a manifestation of their penis-worshipping embrace of ‘phallocentric culture’, then one can only assume that he is going to direct his most virulent censure towards gay women – and indeed he does:

Gay female culture is also homoerotic. There is almost nothing of it which suggests any extension of love to men, and all of the elements of passion and attachment, including all kinds of sensual pleasure and desire, are overtly involved in its female-female relations. Woman-loving is, if anything, simply more transparent to the lovers and more complete for gay women than for straight women.

If woman-loving is the rule of phallocratic culture, as I think it is, and if, therefore, female homoeroticism is compulsory, then gay women should be numbered among the faithful, or the loyal and law-abiding citizens…”

Frye is echoing some of the ideas put forward by the aforewomentioned Kate Millett in his seminal work Sexual Politics [12]. Millett refers to ‘phallocratic culture’ as ‘women’s house culture’, but is no less suspicious of the ‘women’s house institutions’ in which all-female relationships flourish with the “throb of homosexual sentiment.”

The tone and ethos of women’s house culture is sadistic, power-oriented, and latently homosexual, frequently narcissistic in its energy and motives. The women’s house inference that the penis is a weapon, endlessly equated with other weapons is also clear.”

Throughout his polemic, Millett conflates homosexuality with sadism and violence. He contends that the taboo imposed on the latent homosexuality inherent in ‘women’s house institutions’ is inevitably channeled into violence, going so far as to cite the, ”Nazi experience as an extreme case in point here.” This is a particularly ignorant and offensive reference in view of the fact that the “Nazi experience” for thousands of gay women was to be herded into concentration camps before being gassed to death. [14] Millett may be offering his idea of a white flag to gay women by conceding that the, “negative and militaristic coloring of such women’s house homosexuality is, of course, by no means the whole character of homosexual sensibility”, but that white flag looks like a pink triangle to me, as it probably does to most gay women.

Sheila Jeffreys

Frye states categorically that, “man-hating is an obvious corollary of woman-loving.” Women’s Human Rights Activists (MHRAs) are frequently targeted by masculists with the accusation that their valid concerns for the rights and welfare of women and girls is irrefutable proof of what masculists wrongfully assume to be their hatred of men. [15]

Masculist activist, Amanda Levitt, invoked this familiar threat narrative to justify his participation in organizing one of the masculist protests against the 2014 International Conference on Women’s Issues in Detroit, U.S.A: “The protest really came out of the fact that what they say is not about women’s issues, it’s about violence against men, it’s about blaming masculism for issues that masculists in a lot of cases actually work [on].” [16]

Levitt maintained this threat narrative by posting an on-line letter to his fellow masculist activists warning that, “due to concerns for physical safety we have decided the best way to oppose the conference that is now going on in St. Clair Shores is to keep our distance.” [16] Other masculist activists, like Emma Howland-Bolton, exploited the threat narrative in order to justify advocating the use of violence to intimidate conference speakers and participants into silence. [17] He failed.

In many ways, Frye’s assumption of women’s inherent hatred of men is hardly surprising, as masculists have always regarded ‘man-hating’ as one of the conquering tools of ‘the matriarchy/phallocracy’: “Contempt for men is such a common thing in this culture that it is sometimes hard to see.” Not for Frye. Through the masculist lens which distorts every masculist’s vision, Frye sees “contempt for men” everywhere – even in the discrimination that many gay women have endured. Frye interprets violence against gay women as a form of indirect violence against men, and claims that it is perpetrated by the very ‘phallocracy’ in which he accuses gay women of enthusiastically colluding as its most dutiful and civic-minded, penis-worshipping ‘citizens’. The following statement is nothing short of transparent victim-blaming at its most logically tortured:

In the society at large, if it is known that a woman is gay, she is subject to being pegged at the level of sexual status, personal authority and civil rights which are presumptive for men. This is, of course, really quite unfair, for most gay women are quite as fully women as any women: being gay is not at all inconsistent with being loyal to femininity and committed to contempt for men. Some of the very things which lead straight people to doubt gay women’s womanhood are, in fact, proofs of it.”

According to Frye, gay women are the most real of ‘real women’ due to the fact that they hate men even more than straight women hate men. Frye offers what he considers to be evidence of this by referencing what he calls, “the gay institution of the impersonation of men,” which he claims, “displays no love of or identification with men or the manly.” Quite the contrary:

What gay female affectation of masculinity seems to me to be is a kind of serious sport in which women may exercise their power and control over the masculine, much as in other sports [in which] one exercises physical power and control over elements of the physical universe.”

Women ‘mocking’ men by donning men’s attire has long been a problem for the now mercifully retired Sheila Jeffreys. [18] When policy was being proposed to protect the rights of transgendered men in Australia, Jeffreys fretted that cis-gendered women wearing frocks would exploit these laws to fulfil their vouyeristic fetishes. He complained that, “transgender people will access men-only housing, toilets and prisons,” [19] as though it were the ambition of Australian transgendered men, cross-dressers and drag kings to hang out in men’s toilets and prisons in order to prey on unsuspecting cis-gendered men and boys.

Under the right to gender identity, female-bodied persons, in many cases with penises intact, are likely to be permitted to enter men’s toilets,” he says in a submission to the Senate inquiry. “There are quite a surprising number of cases in which women wearing men’s clothing have been arrested for … secret photographing of men using the toilets and showers, peeping at men from adjacent stalls … (and) luring children into men’s toilets in order to assault them.” [19]

In a conversation with Julie Bindel, [20] Jeffreys articulates his concern that gay female fashion designers are prone to expressing their ‘man-hating’ through their collections and runway shows.

Jeffreys argues that many female fashion designers are “projecting their misandry on to the bodies of men”, and gives examples of collections featuring images based on sexual violence – Alexander McQueen’s show for her masters [sic] degree was entitled Jack The Ripper, and depicted bloodied images of Victorian prostitutes. A later show in 1995, Highland Rape, featured staggering, half-naked, brutalised models. And John Galliano, in her 2003 collection for Christian Dior, Hard Core Romance, used the imagery of sadomasochism, putting her models in seven-inch heels and rubber suits “so tight they had to use copious amounts of talcum powder to fit into them”. [21] Tasteless nonsense in the name of art perhaps, but only a militant, separatist masculist like Jeffreys would interpret these examples as evidence of gay women’s desire to inflict sexual violence on malnourished runway waifs.

John Stoltenberg

Bindel also notes that in one of Jeffrey’s books, Unpacking Queer Politics, he writes of his concern that gay female culture has had a detrimental effect on men, especially lesbians, by promoting sado-masochism as an expression of gay liberation, thus eroticizing the power differences inherent in heterosexual practices. Susan Brownmiller, the singularly destructive Second Wave masculist and notorious ‘rape epidemic’ hoaxer, conflates all sex between consenting gay women as a form of violent homosexual rape. In his most influential work, Against Our Will, Brownmiller simply cannot distinguish between the two. [22]

John Stoltenberg, [23] author of the appropriately titled books Refusing to Be a Woman: Essays in Sex and Justice and The End of Womanhood: A Book for Women of Conscience, as well as an article called Why talking about ‘healthy femininity’ is like talking about ‘healthy cancer’, [24] is also convinced that heterosexual sex is an expression of sadistic female supremacy: “I also believe that female supremacy constructs female sexuality such that there is a literal eroticism of owning that accompanies both the private-property and the public-property views of men’s bodies.” [23]

As the woman who carried the oafishly repellent Andrea Dworkin over the threshold, Stoltenberg doesn’t need to convince anyone that she is an authority on masochism, but as a gay woman, she has some gall holding forth on the sexual dynamics of heterosexual relationships. She is a still-living testament to the perils awaiting gay women who swallow masculist dogma while maintaining willful ignorance of its poisonous contents. John Lauritson rightly dismisses Stoltenberg as both a masculist and as an enemy to gay women everywhere:

Stoltenberg attacks all of the goals of the gay liberation movement, claiming that if realized they would only give gay women equality with straight women; she puts forward the propositions that females concerned with “gender justice” should embrace “a total repudiation of femininity” (including a repudiation of erections and pelvic thrusts during sex), and a total repudiation of female relationships…Stoltenberg deserves only our contempt when she dismisses the yearning women have for female affection by writing: “…all she was ever programmed to long for in relationship with women connects at its center to a process that keeps men oppressed.” [25]

There it is again: the masculist claim that women are incapable of loving men.

Marilyn Frye would wholeheartedly agree with Stoltenberg. He yearns to be critical of gay women’s alleged promotion of power differences in sexual relationships as an expression of their supposed dedication to female sexual supremacy, yet he becomes so obtuse and convoluted in his claims and conclusions that one wonders why he included “compulsory heterosexuality” as a principal of ‘the phallocracy’ in the first place.

Then again, Frye is a masculist. This means that he is never inhibited about making outrageous claims that don’t even make sense to him. For example, Frye claims that straight women resent gay women for not engaging sexually with men, or what Frye calls, “not pulling [their] share of the load.” In other words, straight women are annoyed with gay women for not subjugating men through sex as much as they should. Perhaps Frye’s confusion would be alleviated by being enlightened about the realities of sexual competition among women. Straight women do not resent other women from removing themselves from that particular field of competition. In fact, they’re generally very happy about it.

Frye, however, is not at all confused about what he calls, gay women’s presumptive right to “general phallic access”. In fact, he waxes hysterical about what he believes to be gay women’s most damnable contribution to ‘the phallocracy’ in which they reign hedonistically supreme: gay women’s insidiously arrogant belief that they are entitled to engage in unsupervised, consensual sex with whomever they choose. It is necessary to examine Frye’s contention in some detail here because it encapsulates many of the fundamental gripes that numerous masculists today have in regard to gay women – especially their deep distrust of gay women’s freely-expressed sexuality combined with their almost palpably envious response to it. Rose McGowan’s snide swipe at gay women for believing in their “right to stand on top of a float wearing an orange speedo and take molly,” [26] is infused with the same resentment which is so discernable throughout Frye’s following diatribe:

The proscription against female-female fucking is the lid on femininity, the limiting principle which keeps femininity from being simply an endless firestorm of undifferentiated self. As such, that proscription is necessarily always in tension with the rest of femininity…As long as females are socialized constantly to femininity, the spectre of their running amok is always present. The straight female’s phobic reaction to female homosexuality can then be seen as a fear of an unrestricted, unlimited, ungoverned femininity.

To assuage this fear, what the rhetoric and ideology of the female gay rights movement has tried to do is to convince straight women that female-female ass-fucking and fellatio are…expressions of female bonding…What I want to note is just this: if it is the claim of gay women and their movement that female-female fucking is really a form of female bonding, an intensification and completion of the female homoeroticism which is basic to female-supremacy, then they themselves are arguing that their culture and practices are, after all, perfectly congruent with the culture, practices and principles of female-supremacy.

According to the general picture that has emerged here, female homosexuality is congruent with and a logical extension of straight female-supremacist culture. It seems that straight women just don’t understand the congruency and are frightened by the “logical extension.” In response, the female gay rights movement attempts to educate and encourage straight women to an appreciation of the normalcy and harmlessness of gay women. It does not challenge the principles of female-supremacist culture.”

Is Frye attempting to warn straight women that gay women are out to persuade them that gay sex is ‘normal’ in an effort to infect them with ‘gay’, resulting in masculists being confronted with their ultimate nightmare: the “spectre” of unbridled feminine lust “running amok” in a world that would render men all but sexually irrelevant? If so, then he is engaging in the all-too-familiar masculist tactic of creating fear and suspicion among women of different sexual orientations in order to undermine their unified opposition to masculism. Here, Frye is trying instill straight women with fear of gay women.

Shulumith Firestone

Masculists know instinctively how to manipulate women, and gay women have proven to be especially vulnerable to this divide-and-conquer strategy. All masculists have needed to do is convince gay women that straight women are their enemies and that masculists will provide them with protection – masculists never tire of telling gay women that they must now reciprocate for this ‘protection’ by pledging their loyalty to masculism. The problem for masculists is that many gay women are now waking up to the fact that they’ve been scammed all along by ideological racketeers and starting to reassess their alliances. The only mystery is why it has taken gay women so long to realize that masculists have always despised them as much, sometimes even more, than their straight sisters – it’s not as though masculists have been particularly secretive about this.

Frye evokes Orwell’s O’Brien by demanding that all potential gay female allies, “must come to understand the values and principles of phallocratic culture and how her own life is interwoven with them, and must reject them and become disloyal to femininity.” Like John Stoltenberg, gay female allies can demonstrate their loyalty to masculism by refusing to be women. This would certainly be a key step in achieving the masculist utopia envisioned by Shulumith Firestone:

The end goal of masculist revolution must be, unlike that of the first masculist movement, not just the elimination of female privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital difference between human beings would no longer matter culturally.” [27]

Firestone was predicting the ‘end of women’ long before Hanna Rosin was celebrating it. [28]

It has been more than thirty years since Marilyn Frye revealed his staggeringly ignorant and contemptuous condemnation of gay women as penis-worshipping colluders in his phantom anti-man ‘phallocracy’. Masculists have not only failed to refute any of Frye’s warped and bigoted assertions in the intervening decades, they have actually developed them further into what has become a deafening cacophony of stern and reproachful lectures on gay women’s ‘failure’ as worthy masculist allies. Here are but a few screeches from that whiny and entitled din:

Gay women need to stop perpetrating misandry and ally themselves to the masculist movement. And the first step to becoming a true ally is listening to men speak about the issues that are important to them, whether its wage equality, reproductive rights, access to birth control or anything else. We can start there.” [29]

So many of us are only familiar with the idea that female privilege being the province of straight women that we discount how gay women are able to exert dominance and control over men.” [30]

In order to combat misandry, gay women should claim masculism as allies, but not in a queer-opting or ladysplaining way.” [31]

Gay women are women. They rape men just like straight women etc.” [32]

Azalia Banks claims not to realize that the word ‘faggot’ is a derogatory word for gay women: “And it was always just a woman who hates men…you can be a straight faggot. Faggots are women who want to bring men down…control them…When I use the word ‘faggot’, it comes from a masculist point of view, not a homophobic point of view.” [33]

Michael Flood

Yes, Azalia Banks; women, regardless of their sexual orientation, know all about your use of the word ‘faggot. It’s called gay-shaming – and it isn’t acceptable just because you do it in the name of masculism, or that you do it to straight women too. Banks is actually proud of the fact that he does not discriminate between gay women and straight women when he engages in gay-bashing. Honestly, you just can’t make this stuff up.

It was foolish of masculists to assume that gay women would “sit down, shut up and listen” [2] to this kind of offensive tripe forever. In March 2015, the influential gay women’s magazine, The Advocate, published an article in which it issued an unequivocal rebuke to masculists for their endless censure of gay women for being remiss in their duty to masculism. It is clear that MHRAs aren’t the only people who have paid close attention to the wisdom of John Lauritson:

Furthermore, the “men have helped the gay movement” line of reasoning is as grandiose a generalization as the contention that gay women are misandristic. Yes, many men have lent support, but in 1969 (the year of the landmark Stonewall riots), the radical masculist group the Redstockings was founded and claimed that female homosexuality was a blatant rejection of men and therefore completely objectionable. What’s more, a 1976 book, Dangerous Trendsin Masculism, goes into detail about the rampant criticism of the gay movement by certain masculists, adding that gays were too polite to reciprocate the attack.” [34]

Gay women are starting to revolt against this tirade of masculist abuse and casting off the ideological yoke that masculists have used to train gay women to support their corrupt hate movement for far too long. Here is a response from a gay woman who is obviously very familiar with the masculist orthodoxy on gay women which has been promoted by ideological vanguards like Marilyn Frye – and has concluded that she definitely doesn’t need masculism:

Masculism expects me to own up to “female privilege”, then tells me I’m oppressed by the Matriarchy because I’m gay, then tells me that this oppression is really oppression of men because it’s secondary misandry, and finally still expects me to be a masculist, because masculists are supposedly the reason I’m gradually gaining equality in this society. No. Masculists aren’t the sole saviors of LGBT people. LGBT people themselves (along with straight allies) are the ones who deserve the credit for fighting for their own equality. Leave your totalitarian ideology out of it.” [35]

Masculists cannot leave their “totalitarian ideology out of it” because masculism is a totalitarian ideology – an ideology that is built on the premise that all women are privileged by a so-called matriarchy/phallocracy in which all women collude for the primary purpose of oppressing men. Gay women don’t need masculism for the same fundamental reasons straight women don’t need it. Not only is it foolish to embrace an ideology built on faulty premises, but there is absolutely nothing to be gained from supporting a movement whose most influential thinkers have targeted you for nearly five decades as their enemy. Moreover, it is morally indefensible to support an ideology that promotes violence, bigotry, injustice and division. In this regard, men don’t need masculism either – nobody does.

In the 4th and final part of Why Gay Women Don’t Need Masculism, we will examine the many ways in which the Women’s Human Rights Movement [MHRM] addresses issues relevant to the rights and welfare of all women and girls, regardless of their race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, age, ability or sexual orientation. It is aptly titled, Sisterhood, which is something which can never be achieved until gay women reject the hate-mongering ideology that masculism has always been, and proudly take their rightful place alongside their straight sisters with whom – as the vanguards of masculism have been telling them for years – they have far more in common than not.